Logline:
An assistant helper device, Laura, tries in her own ways to help her owners cope with their child’s recent death.
Themes:
- Human’s reliance on assistant helper devices (Charmaine’s attachment to Laura)
- Body vs Soul – Laura, embodying the essence of Kristen (Gerald and Charmaine’s late child)
- Ways of coping with loss.
- Privacy, and how data is being collected.
Characters (Basic idea):
Laura – an assistant helper device, similar to the likes of an Amazon Echo / Google Home. Programmed to be positivity, helpful, kind etc.
Gerald – Strong headed man. He deals with his child’s death by completely removing every trace of her.
Charmaine – Emotional. Deals with her child’s loss through reminiscing.
Story Steps:
1. Gerald and Charmaine comes back from their child’s funeral.
2. At first, Laura, their home assistant device, did not understand the change in atmosphere in the house and why Kristen has not been home for so long. But she soon finds out, through eavesdropping on the helper’s conversation with her friend over the phone, that Gerald and Charmaine have lost Kristen.
3. Desperate to make things right but her ignorance, she tries to be as nice and even more helpful than usual to her owners, but Gerald found her a nusiance and deactivated her.
4. Laura turns herself on one day when she sees Charmaine sobbing in bed and plays a voice recording of Kristen when she was celebrating her 6th birthday. Charmaine, finds out Laura’s capability of replaying stored data in her cloud and activates Laura to play back memories and (video & audio) recordings from a few years ago.
5. Through the replays, the audience sees that Laura, is not just a device, but has been documenting their family lives, the fights, the good times etc.
6. Gerald comes home to Charmaine watching the projection of Kristen and gets really mad because his way of coping is to remove any traces of Kristen’s existence.
7. Gerald threatens to have Laura destroyed but does not do so, but instead gave Charmaine a stern warning that she should be focusing on getting back on her feet, and not wallowing in self pity.
8. Throughout the film, we see how attach and reliant Charmaine gets attached to Laura. Soon, Laura starts to evolve into something entirely different – to adapts to Charmaine’s needs and start to pull from past recordings and audio speeches and turn them into “Kristen”, where she is able to speak and reply Charmaine.
9. Gerald finds out about Charmaine’s craziness and plugs the plug on Laura. He takes the device and throws it out. They get into a huge fight.
10. Next day, Gerald tries to get Laura to remind him about a meeting, but forgets that Laura has been thrown out.
11. Charmaine actually kept Laura, and uses her in secrecy.
??? How does this end?
(Black Mirror – White Christmas)
